New poem: Holy Innocents

for Garcia Rayn Leavitt "O holy innocents! I have / no virtue but to praise / you who believe / life is possible. . ." -- Denise Levertov

Only a great soul would choose to be born into the early morning darkness of late November near the norther edges of this republic of fear under a waning moon, drawn forth from the lithe body of a dreadlocked dancer by Mennonite midwives, delivered into the arms of a once jaded revolutionary who finally discovered his most radical act was to believe life was still possible. How could a dying empire not be shaken by such audacious hope?

Nothing is ever lost

In a universe where nothing is created or destroyed, nothing is ever lost.

 We keep dancing through new forms, new arrangements . . .

 but at the core every true connection we make persists across space and time.

A Brief History of the War Against the Imagination

A work in progress:

 

Diane DiPrima wrote "the only war that matters is the war against the imagination."

The colonization and occupation of our imagination is what makes every other war possible.

Systems of control gain their power and legitimacy by making themselves appear natural and inevitable.  They tell us stories about how the world works, subtly convincing us to accept certain assumptions and certain forms of logic that lead us to accept their power and their actions -- and renders it nearly impossible to see alternatives.   Its a process so subtle as to be almost invisible. 

But like all wars, the current war against the imagination has a history, and a set of conditions from which it emerged.  By tracing that history, we can begin to see outside the narrow constraints of what we have believed possible.

_______________________________________________________________

Modern science, politics, and economics trace themselves back to a period we now call "The Enlightenment."  Most of us grew up hearing stories of how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a handful of bold visionaries began to challenge the authority of the church, and their leadership allowed Europe to reach to a new level of sophistication, developing forms of knowledge, medicine, government, and business that they exported first to the Americas and then to the world, spreading freedom and progress.  More recent versions of the story grudgingly acknowledge that Europeans gained some useful knowledge from the peoples they colonized, and that their methods of colonization weren't always purely benevolent.  But these versions still see modern U.S. and European culture as the pinnacle of human development, albeit the product of a sometimes imperfect process.

But the truth is more complicated.  To begin with, Christianity hadn't fully taken hold in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in rural areas.  Peasants disguised their old gods and goddesses as saints, much as practitioners of Santeria and Voodoo do today in Brazil and the Caribbean, and continued to celebrate old holidays and old rites.  Magic and medicine came together in the work of herbalists and midwives who understood the connections between the health of the body and the health of the land.  Farmers planted and harvested based on the cycles of the sun and the moon. The persistence of cultures that saw the world as alive, shaped people's political, economic, and legal relationships to the land they lived on.  As Starhawk writes:

"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were still areas of common land in Europe that belonged to the community rather than individuals.  While land ownership was highly concentrated and enormously hierarchical, land was nevertheless not considered mere property that could be bought or sold in isolation -- but rather a nexus of rights and responsibilites deeply tied to a community.  Peasants might not own any land, but the might have the hereditary right to gather wood in the lord's forest or graze their pigs under his oak trees.  The folk customs -- the maypoles and Morris dances and fairy tales tied to particular places on the landscape -- all reinforced those traditions. [ . . . ] The view of the land as animated by spirits and nonhuman intelligences was a deterrent to its wholesale exploitation."

 

None of this came easily.  The right of the poor to live off the land was constantly contested by rulers seeking to exert greater control over the land and the people.  And when that right was challenged, peasants fought back.   The legend of Robin Hood grows out of a tradition of rural resistance in England dating back to Celtic struggles against the Roman Empire.  For the most part, the landed gentry saw that the cost of putting down constant rebellions outweighed the benefit of further exploitation of the land, and so they reluctantly adopted a policy of benign neglect toward their rural subjects.

But by the late 1500's, the balance and basis of power were shifting throughout Europe.  To quote Starhawk again:

"New economic stresses caused by the influx of gold from the Americas challenged the power of the old ruling classes,  which was based on land.  A new power began to arise, based on money, trade, and the beginnings of capitalism.  With it came a new ideology, the mechanistic model of the universe, which saw the world as made up of separate objects that had no inherent life, could be viewed and examined in isolation from one another, and could be exploited without constraint.

"For this new economic order to be accepted, old ideas of the dynamic interrelatedness of the universe and the sacredness of nature needed to be broken down.  A new ideology was enforced, and one mechanism for effecting this mass change in consciousness was the fear and terror engendered by the Witch burnings."

 

Strong, vocal women had certainly been burned as witches long before the 1500's.  But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the church and the state began hunting down suspected witches in a systematic way.  Thousands of herbalists and midwives were executed on charges of trafficking with the devil.  Why were these women seen as such a threat? A good herbalist maintains a close connection to the plants she works with, understanding them as part of a living system, and understanding  the intricate relationships between plants and humans and how they are  mirrored by the intricate relationships among the organs and cells  of our own  bodies.  Midwives have a deep relationship with the power and mystery of women's bodies that defies reduction and translation into mechanized clinical procedures.  

Herbal medicine and midwifery also gave people more power over their  own lives. Most rural people had some basic knowledge of the plants needed to cure common ailments -- and could grow or gather these  plants themselves.  The midwives of the time were especially dangerous because they  generally also knew about herbs that could prevent or end a pregnancy , giving women more control of their own bodies -- just as many do today.

There was something else at work too -- the culture's conflation of the fertility of the land with the fertility of women's bodies, and its desire to control both.  As historian Carolyn Merchant writes:

"Nature cast in the female gender, when stripped of activity and rendered passive, could be dominated by science, technology, and capitalist production. During the transition to early modern capitalism, women lost ground in the sphere of production (through curtailment of their roles in the trades), while in the sphere of reproduction William Harvey and other male physicians were instrumental in undermining women's traditional roles in midwifery and hence women's control over their own bodies. During the same period, Francis Bacon advocated extracting nature's secrets from 'her' bosom through science and technology. The subjugation of nature as female [ . . .] was thus integral to the scientific method as power over nature: "As woman's womb had symbolically yielded to the forceps, so nature's womb harbored secrets that through technology could be wrested from her grasp for use in the improvement of the human condition."

 

Essentially, the goal was to bring production under control.   Control of sexuality and control of the land were linked -- its no mistake that Puritanism and capitalism arose at the same time.   The world was defined as a machine to be used to maximize human progress.  And human progress was defined in terms of material wealth.   Those who benefited from the new system were believed to be destined to succeed -- either by divine providence or natural superiority.  Those who questioned the new system were seen as backward, heretical, superstitious, or subversive. 

The poor were forced off their land and into the cities, and new technologies designed to maximize productivity replaced artisans with machine operators.   Resistance movements --  like the Luddites who smashed the machines that were rendering their jobs obsolete, and the Diggers who attempted to reassert the right to work land that had once been held in common -- were brutally crushed.   Old fertility rites that tied people to the land -- like dancing around the May Pole -- were outlawed.

Across the ocean, the conquest of the Americas continued.   At best, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were seen as backward people who would benefit from the introduction of Christianity and capitalism.  More frequently they were seen as inferior beings who needed to be enslaved or eradicated. 

The eighteenth century saw the rise of early forms of industrial agriculture -- vast plantations in the Americas  supplied Europe with cotton, sugar, indigo, and other commodities.   Genocide and disease had taken their toll on the subjugated native populations, and so people were kidnapped from Africa to work the fields.

Its nearly impossible to comprehend the scale of the violence unleashed across four continents as Europe's merchant class attempted to shape the world to its will and its desires.
________________________________________________________

Almost every ideological movement within our culture in the past four hundred years has been rooted in the set of assumptions that drove that violence.

The American Revolution was largely a dispute over who would benefit from the wealth being extracted from the land in England's North American colonies.  Demands for democracy and freedom of speech stemmed largely from the desire of merchants and land owners to defend their own economic interests.

The Darwinian model of evolution saw a linear progression in the development of life, with human beings at the pinnacle of evolution -- a view shared by Creationists, who tell the same story in different terms, but not supported by modern biology that understands the complex ways in which species co-evolve and depend on each other to maintain healthy ecological balances.  Perverse forms of Darwinism helped to fuel the rise of Fascism.

Karl Marx shared the view that humans were destined to achieve greatness by maximizing productivity -- he simply sought to democratize the control of the means of production and redistribute the system's benefits.

 

_______________________________________________________

When the Soviet empire, ostensibly driven by Marx's ideology, collapsed in the late 1980's, neo-conservative scholar Francis Fukuyama famously posited that we had reached "the end of history,"  the natural conclusion of all ideological struggles, resulting in the global dominance of a perfect system -- capitalist democracy.  What followed was the rapid acceleration of attempts to unite the world under a single economic order.

But a system so vast and complex is also incredibly vulnerable -- the more it grows, the more places there are for it to begin to break down.  And in the early years of the twenty-first century, those systems of control are facing threats from both within to without.    From the military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan to personal and national credit crises to the rise of drug resistant disease, the vulnerability of our military, political, economic, and medical systems are being revealed.

At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that the conquest celebrated in our history books was never really complete.   Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, Africa, and even much of Asia have continued to resist control, holding their own in what Subcomandante Marcos of Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) calls "“the largest war in the history of humanity, which is already 515 years old."  The survival of cultures that see the Earth as alive in the face of five centuries of genocide is an astonishing accomplishment.  And as dwindling resources push corporations deeper into the forests and mountains and deserts that governments and militaries have never fully conquered, people are fighting back.  With the U.S. military, the self-appointed guardian of the economic order, tied up in the Middle East, popular movements have succeeded in claiming power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela -- and to a degree in Argentina.  (A fact not lost on John Kerry, who bemoaned the fact that the U.S. was unable to send troops to help put down the Bolivian and Argentinian uprisings.)

By demonstrating that "other worlds are possible," these popular movements have also given hope to many in Europe and the U.S.  Meanwhile, revivals of Earth-based spirituality and herbal medicine, and new philosophies of science that see the world as dynamic and complex, reveal the breakdown of the mechanistic philosophy that has driven the most violent culture in the history of the world.

We are at a crucial turning point in the war against the imagination.

 

MRSA and the End of Antibiotics

The deaths of an alarming number of children and teenagers from drug resistant staph infections, and the publication this week of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  report stating that these infections are evidence that our society's overuse of antibiotics is having deadly consequences.

According to the CDC, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus  (MRSA) infections generally effect people in hospitals and nursing homes with weakened immune systems.  However in recent weeks the disease has spread among otherwise healthy people who have had  little or no contact with hospitals -- most notably among high school athletes.

The CDC claims that the disease can usually be treated using antibiotics not related to methicillin and pennicilin.  But the fact that the diseases is spreading to new populations may suggest that it is mutating.  Bacteria develop resistance to new drugs quickly -- and S. aureus has a special talent for developing new resistance.  In 1999,  Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote:

"Over the past decades, this particular staph species ha learned resistance to one antibiotic after another.  (Several researchers believe [and have demonstrated in vitro to prove their point] that S. aureus learned resistance from benign E. coli in the human gut.) Not so long ago, staph was still susceptible to two antibiotics: methicillin and vancomycin. Inevitably, methicillin-resistant staph (MRSA) emerged.  Physicians and reseachers were worried but tried to hold the line, to stop any further adaptation by S. aureus.  Given the nature of bacteria, they were doomed to failure: on August 2, 1998 The New York Times reported the first four world cases of vancomycin-resistant staph.  There are no antibiotics that can successfully treat vancomycin resistant S. aureus. [ . . .]

"[ . . .] Bacteria learn resistance in an inexorable exponential growth curve, and using mathematical modeling researchers had predicted with uncanny accuracy, almost to the month, when vancomycin-resistant staph would appear.  It will now proceed into the general population of the world at the same exponential rate."

Exposure to pharmaceutical antibiotics stimulates bacteria to evolve more quickly, cycling through all the possible defenses against the chemical they have been exposed to.   Through the same process they often also develop resistance to other, unrelated antibiotics. When they succeed in developing new resistances, they emit special pheremones to attract other bacteria and pass on the new resistance information.

Our bodies are saturated with antibiotics  -- even if we don't take them directly.  Factory farms routinely administer  the drugs to livestock to stimulate growth.  Those antibiotics are passed onto us through our food -- and they also enter our environment when they are excreted by humans and animals.

We are doomed to lose the pharaceutical arms race in which we keep bombarding bacteria with new chemicals and they keep responding with new forms of resistance.

But all is not lost:

Bacteria "forget" their resistance over time.  So if we were to dramatically reduce antibiotic use across the board, over time diseases like MRSA would decline, and we would be able to continue to use antibiotics in extreme cases where nothing else is effective.

And while bacteria quickly develop resistance to the relatively simple compounds we generally use in medicine, they have a much harder time developing resistance to more complex plant medicines that contain a multitude of synergistic compounds.  And since plant medicine is living medicine, plant chemistry evolves over time, often providing new responses to human and animal diseases. 

So if we want to defeat MRSA and other virulent new diseases, we need to radically change our approach to medicine. 

As ethnobotanist James Duke writes:

"When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful amont them.  We lose the synergy when we take out a single compound.  But most important we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine.  The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plant, may be our best hope in confronting drug-resistant bacteria."

For more on these issues see Buhner's Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives to Treating Drug Resistant Bacteria. (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 1999.)

Giuliani, NAFTA, and Mexico's Street Vendors

The New York Times'  James McKinley reports that 1,000 police in riot gear swept through downtown Mexico City last week, clearing 87 streets of unlicensed vendors. 

The raids have their origin in a "zero tolerance" policy toward petty crime adopted by the city's previous mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ("AMLO") at the recommendation of Rudolph Giuliani.   Giuliani had been brought to Mexico City at the recommendation of a group of business leaders led  multi-billionaire Carlos Slim.  (See Noah Friedsky's "Giuliani's Mexico City Game" in Issue #31 of The Narco News Bulletin.)

Of course Giuliani never bothered to ask why Mexico City had so many steet vendors.  Fifty percent of the city's population lives in poverty, and vending is the only way many people can afford to feed their families.

Many are economic refugees from rural areas.  Mexico has faced a devastating economic crisis since the passage of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn from heavilly subsidized corporate farms in the U.S. midwest.

Perhaps this is why, as McKinley notes,  "attempts to clear the streets of unlicensed vendors have often been interpreted in the past as an attack on the poor."

Compulsory health care? And my delayed return to the blogosphere . .

Shortly after I announced I was going to begin blogging again regularly my hard drive died . . . But all is well now (at least computer wise) . . .

In other news, John Edwards annouced yesterday that under his health care plan everyone will be required to buy health insurance and make annual visists to the doctor.   Its a short step from there to requiring people to comply with their doctors' treatment plans.

I don't question Edwards' motives (in this case) -- I believe he honestly wants to see people live healthier lives.  But his plan would force people into a system that threatens their personal health and the public health. (See my article "What Kind of Health Care Will be Universalized?"

People should be able to make their own choices about what to put into their bodies and how to handle their health care.  Yes, we need to universalize access.  But that access shouldn't be compulsory.  And people should be free to choose alternatives -- and ideally have those alternatives subsidized. 

Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

"Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."
-- Bob Dylan
 

It began as a feeling, a sense of impending destruction and impending liberation, two sides of the same coin -- like the feeling just before an August thunderstorm, when you know the rain will cool the air and break the humidity, but you also know one lightning strike could set your house on fire.

As summer went on, I discovered that nearly everyone in my life was having that same feeling.  Cautiously, at first, we began to talk about it.  The same questions kept coming up: Was this the beginning of the end of its empire?  What would its death throes be like?  What should we be preparing for?  How long did we have to get ready?

All around us, systems of control are falling apart.  The burning tower is the sign of our times: there is an eerie resonance between the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and the tarot's image of a falling tower, representing the collapse of elaborate and desperately held illusions.  The power of an empire depends on its ability to project a sense of invulnerability -- a sense that is nearly impossible to regain once it is lost.

The military, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan has lost its control of South America, with Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador claiming control of their own oil and gas at the very point when global oil supplies are beginning to dwindle.

Hurricane Katrina revealed the devastating effects of our government's decision to dismantle, defund, and privatize programs that the poorest and most vulnerable in our country depend on to survive -- essentially applying the economic policies we force on poorer nations to our own cities.  In its aftermath, armies of mercenaries, fresh from Iraq, patrolled the streets, imposing "order" with complete impunity.  It will be years before the full story of exactly what happened in New Orleans emerges.

Record temperatures and fierce storms have forced even the White House to acknowledge global warming.  The elites are scrambling for technological solutions to the problem that will allow them to continue to maintain their way of life.  The costs of those technologies will be borne by the rest of the world.  A new generation of nuclear plants will create waste that will last longer than humanity.  The demand for crops for biofuels will soon exceed the size of the world surplus, and put the world in a situation of real food scarcity.

AIDS ravishes Africa and Asia.  Here in North America, the chemical soup we live in has spawned bacteria and viruses with immunity to drugs we haven't even discovered yet (not to mention immunities to all the drugs we have) while weakening our immune systems.   The bodies of the poor have become dumping grounds for genetically engineered, chemically contaminated corn, wheat, and soy.  Our trade policies have wiped out subsistence economies around the world.  Our genetically modified crops have contaminated the oldest varieties of corn in the world.  The loss of plant diversity has created monocultures vulnerable to disease, making famine a real danger in the wealthiest country in the world.

The collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market revealed the vulnerability of the economy, and the precariousness of the house of cards we've collectively built, taking on new debts to pay off old ones.

Those in power know that the situation is inherently unstable, so they use fear to sell repression, eroding civil liberties.  Most Congressional Democrats only want to be consulted about the Bush administration's policies, and when given a seat at the table will gladly hand over their constituents' freedom of speech and right to privacy.

In the face of these onslaughts, its not that the best lack all conviction, but that the best lack all direction.  Traditional political solutions no longer make any sense when it becomes increasingly clear that a system bent on exercising absolute control is poison at its root.  Traditional economics turns the world into a set of commodities.  A handful of religious and spiritual teachers rightly identify the current situation as a crisis of consciousness, but for the most part they are only interested in the spiritual liberation of the individual soul, missing the bigger picture, or any sense of collective transformation.  All the methods of analysis we have developed are themselves attempts to reduce the world to a set of equations that we can understand and manipulate.

And as we search for a way forward, many of us are finding our own lives falling apart under the stresses of these transformations.  Job losses, broken and strained relationships, disease, strange feelings of alienation abound.   We find ourselves under a fire teaching.  Forced to confront our deepest fears and insecurities in order to finally claim our own power.  And lacking the guidance and support we are used to in the process.

Mayan prophecies speak of the hummingbird who breaks open the world to unleash the chaos that brings peace.  And physics and mathematics tell us that chaos isn't disorder, but the incredibly complex order of self-organizing systems that we are only beginning to perceive and understand.  The living world is breaking through the concrete, making itself felt again.

Everything we've been taught tells us to hold on tight. But more and more of what we've taught keeps turning out to be illusion.  Our instincts tell us to dance with the storm.  But do our bodies still remember how? 

We won't know until we stand outside and feel the rain falling on our skin.

Wild Innocence

Something about the great blue heron that flew across my path at the pond today made me think of innocence.

Blake defined innocence as inexperience, believing the world to be a place of corruptuion.

But I believe innocence is something raw and wild and vulnerable and strong that we sustain at our core.  Its about remaining fully open, engaged with the living world without expectation or apology.

The Feri tradition of witchcraft speaks of the "black heart of innocence" which T. Thorn Coyle defines as:

"the innocent, sexual state found in the child before her force was constrained and perverted, and in the animal still roaming in the wild."

 That place inside us always awaits our return.  And its that place I want to live from.

 

Staying in the Room: Rethinking Pychedelic Spirituality

A few years ago I went to a workshop Krishna Das gave in Cambridge the day after one of his concerts.  During the workshop he said:

"LSD can get you into the room with Christ.  But you can't stay there." 

Those words have come back to me lately as I've been re-evaluating the role of both marijuana and psychedelics in my life.

My early experiences in college with chemically altering my consciousness reaffirmed my childhood belief that the world was a richly layered place with more dimensions than immediately met the eye and that the boundaries between those dimensions are very fluid.  Marijuana reintroduced me to the subtle play of energies. Psilocybin mushroom helped me to experience the forest as a living, breathing entity with its own collective consciousness.  LSD dissolved the binary structure of the templates we put over the world.

But like any powerful tool, its easy to become too reliant on psychedelics and ignore the hard work that is required to develop sustained connections with other realms and integrate those connections into daily reality.  They call it a "trip" because you go somewhere quickly and then come back.

And I think living in a painful time like ours it is very tempting to use these tools to create doorways to escape to levels of reality that haven't been as severely damaged by our culture's 500 years of destruction.  Even that can be legitimate in small and occasional doses in order to aid in the restoration of hope, but that balance is difficult to maintain.

 I think that everyone's spiritual journeys are very different, and I am wary of questioning the tools other people use in their own work -- but it is becoming clear to me at this point in my own journey that these are tools I need to put aside for awhile. These past few months, my magical practice and my time in the forest have brought me into a beautifully deep and unmediated conversation with the living planet, and I feel like some of the plant and fungal allies that once helped me remember that this kind of communication was a possibility do more to hinder that communication for me right here and right now.

 I am not ruling out the idea that these allies might become tools for me to use again -- most likely in the rare, ritual, reverential way they were used by my druidic ancestors and that has sometimes marked my practice in the past.  But for now, if I want to be able to stay in the room, I need to find my own way there.

Of Mitochondria and Mutual Aid

Its late and my mind is rambling, so please bear with me . . . 

The version of evolution most of us were taught in school doesn't reflect nature's rich and complex realities.  And mainstream biology is just beginning to catch up with some of the insights of one of the earliest critics of strict Darwinism.

In 1902, the great Russian anarchist philosopher and scientist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, a brilliant book that refuted the sociological and psuedo-scientific claims of the social Darwinists who saw both nature and human society as arenas of fiece competition for survival.  Basing his arguements on his own observations of wild animals throughout Eurasia and his undertanding of human history, Kropotkin argued that cooperation is actually an important survival mechanism.  He wrote:

 "As soon as we study animals -- not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains -- we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: 'Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy."

Kropotkin's ideas were largely ignored in scientific circles, but developments in evolutionary biology in recent decades have not only vindicated his claim, but gone further, demonstrating that mutual aid between species is an important factor in evolution.  Particularly important has been the work of Lynn Margulis, which Stephen Harrod Buhner briefly summarizes in The Lost Language of Plants :

"Margulis was intrigued by the fact that mitochondria in cells have their own genes. Mitochondria are the cell's intracellular power factories and supply the energy for all metabolism. Standard theory had it that only the genes in the nucleus of cells had any importance, the genes in mitochondria were considered irrelavant. Marguli eventually realized that mitochondria were once free-living bacteria that had been incorporated into cell to power their metabolism.  This, and other discoveries led to her revolutionary understanding of the nature of the evolution of complex life-forms.

"Margulis discovered that all complex life developed from an original symbiosis of four different bacteria: archaebacteria, spirochetes, cyanobacteria, and oxygen-breathing bacteria. After this early unification other kinds of bacteria were incorporated into the structure of cells. Genetic mapping and comparison to free-roving bacteria have proved that three of these bacterial forms were incorporated into the first nucleated cells.  The remaining step is proving that spirochetes, or wriggling bacteria were incorporated into cell to give them mobility. In essence, all nucleated cells were formed from the fusion of individual bacteria.  Unlike individuals joined together to form entirely different, more complex entities these organisms had the characteristics of the simpler bacteria as well as more unique qualities that come from the synergy of the fusion."

Working with James Lovelock, Margulis later applied a similar model to looking at the planet, putting forward the Gaia hypothesis -- the idea that the Earth itself is a self-regulating living system.

Both these ideas raise fundamental questions about the nature of the self:

 If our bodies are a community of smaller organisms, and in turn are dependent on their symbiotic relationships with other beings, does it really make sense to define our skins or our auras as the boundaries of ourselves?

If the self doesn't begin or end at the boundary of its skin, do we bring something new into the world when we form an emotionally symbiotic relationship with someone else?

And now that we know that we ourselves are communities of interdependent beings that are in turn part of larger symbiotic communities, isn't defending any living system an act of self defense?